Private Markets Sector

Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin is raising roughly $10 billion in its first-ever outside funding round — a milestone that values the firm at $130 billion, per sources cited by CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin. Bezos himself is kicking in $2 billion, hedge fund Coatue Management is contributing $4 billion, and the remaining $4 billion has drawn heavy demand from other major investors. This is a textbook late-stage private markets deal: a company that was previously self-funded (Bezos financed Blue Origin entirely through Amazon stock sales) opening its cap table to institutional capital for the first time. The timing is no coincidence — it follows SpaceX's record-breaking IPO last month, which demonstrated that the market has a serious appetite for commercial space exposure, and Blue Origin clearly wants a piece of that narrative.

SpaceX shares closed at $148 Wednesday — below the $150 first-trade price and down sharply from a closing high of $201.80 just weeks ago — as the initial Nasdaq-100 inclusion-driven buying frenzy fades, per CNBC. The company was added to the Nasdaq-100 index (a benchmark tracking the 100 largest non-financial stocks on the Nasdaq, which forces index funds and ETFs to buy the stock) in under a month after its June 12 IPO, one of the fastest such inclusions on record. Analyst sentiment remains mostly bullish: Morgan Stanley targets $300, Bernstein $239, RBC $225, and UBS $210 — though MoffettNathanson is neutral and CFRA recommends selling. For private markets investors watching from the sidelines, the post-IPO drift is a useful reality check: even the largest IPO in history ($85.7 billion raised) isn't immune to the gravitational pull of price discovery once the index-rebalancing bid evaporates.

Swedish AI startup Lovable is in talks to raise $300 million at a $13.2 billion valuation — exactly double what it was worth last December — with Menlo Ventures expected to lead the round, per Sifted and TechCrunch. The company, which makes 'vibe coding' software (tools that let non-programmers build apps by describing what they want in plain language), hit $500 million in annualized revenue run rate in June, a remarkable clip for a sub-three-year-old startup. Enterprise customers including Nvidia, Asana, and Workday give Lovable a stickier revenue base than most early-stage AI darlings, which partly justifies the eye-watering multiple. The round arrives in a red-hot vibe-coding market — Replit is valued at $9 billion, and Cursor was acquired by SpaceX last month for $60 billion — signaling that private investors are still willing to pay steep prices for AI infrastructure with genuine usage.